Thursday, 23 February 2017

I am beginning to develop an
addiction to Hansard, the public record of debates in Parliament and the House
of Lords. It's a fascinating public record of how major political decisions are
debated, and I feel fortunate to live in a country where it is readily
available on the internet the day after a debate.

Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his
capacity as head of the US Government, but he should not be invited to make an
official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the
Queen.

I've been taking a look at
the debate from 20th February, which divided neatly down party lines,
with the Conservatives and a single DUP member supporting the state visit, and
everyone else (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Green) opposing it.

A notable point about the
defenders of the State Visit is that virtually none of them attempted to defend
Trump himself. The case that speaker after speaker made was that we should
invite Trump despite of his awfulness. Indeed, some speakers argued that we'd
invited other awful people before – Emperor Hirohito, President Ceausescu, Xi
Jinping and Robert Mugabe - so we would be guilty of double standards if we did
not invite Trump as well.

It was noted, however, that
this argument did not hold much water, as none of these other invitees had been
extended this honour within a week of being elected, and other far less
controversial US presidents had never had a State Visit.

The principal argument used
to support the government's position was a pragmatic one: it will be to the
benefit of the UK if we work with the US, our oldest ally. That way we may be
able to influence him, and also to achieve good trade deals. Dr Julian Lewis
(Con) went even further, and suggested that by cosying up to Trump we might be
able to avert World War 3:

…given he is in some doubt about continuing the
alliance that prevented world war three and is our best guarantee of world war
three not breaking out in the 21st century‚ do they really think it is more
important to berate him, castigate him and encourage him to retreat into some
sort of bunker, rather than to do what the Prime Minister did, perhaps more
literally than any of us expected, and take him by the hand to try to lead him
down the paths of righteousness? I have no doubt at all about the matter.

He continued:

What really matters to the future of Europe is that
the transatlantic alliance continues and prospers. There is every prospect of
that happening provided that we reach out to this inexperienced individual and
try to persuade him‚there is every chance of persuading him, to continue with
the policy pursued by his predecessors.

I can't imagine this is an
argument that would be appreciated by Trump, as it manages to be both
patronising and insulting at the same time.

The closest anyone dared
come to being positive about Trump was when Nigel Evans (Con) said:

We might not like some of the things he says. I
certainly do not like some of what he has said in the past, but I respect the
fact that he is now delivering the platform on which he stood. He will go down
in history as the only politician roundly condemned for delivering on his
promises. I know this is a peculiar thing in the politics we are used to here‚-
politicians standing up for something and delivering‚- but that is what Trump
is doing.

But most of those supporting
the visit did so while attempting to distance themselves from Trump's personal
characteristics, e.g. Gregory Campbell (CON):

My view is that Candidate Trump and Mr Trump made
some deplorable and vile comments, which are indefensible - they cannot be
defended morally, politically or in any other way - but he is the
democratically elected President of the United States of America.

Other made the point in rather
mild and general terms, e.g. Anne Main:

Any of us who have particular concerns about some of
President Trump's pronouncements are quite right to have them; I object
completely to some of the things that have been said.

If we turn to the comments
made by the speakers who opposed the state visit, then they were considerably
more vivid in the negative language they used to portray Trump, with many
focusing on the less savoury aspects of his character:

Paul Flynn (Lab) referred to
the 'cavernous depths of his scientific ignorance'. Others picked up on Trump's
statements on women, Muslims, the LGBT community, torture, and the press:

I think of my five-year-old daughter when I reflect
on a man who considers it okay to go and grab pussy, a man who considers it
okay to be misogynistic towards the woman he is running against. Frankly, I
cannot imagine a leader of this country, of whatever political stripe, behaving
in that manner. David Lammy (Lab)

President Trump's Administration so far has been
characterised by ignorance and prejudice, seeking to ban Muslims and deny
refuge to people fleeing from war and persecution. Kirsten Oswald (SNP)

Even if one were the ultimate pragmatist for whom the
matters of equality or of standing against torture, racism and sexism do not
matter, giving it all up in week 1 on a plate with no questions asked would not
be a sensible negotiating strategy. Stephen
Doughty (Lab)

I fought really hard to be elected. I fought against
bigotry, sexism and the patriarchy to earn my place in this House. By allowing
Donald Trump a state visit and bringing out the china crockery and the red
carpet, we endorse all those things that I fought hard against and say, Do you
know what? It's okay.Naz Shah (Lab)

Let me conclude by saying that in my view, Mr Trump
is a disgusting, immoral man. He represents the very opposite of the values we
hold and should not be welcome here. Daniel
Zeichner (Lab)

We are told that Trump is
very thin-skinned and gets furious when criticised. It is also said that he
doesn't read much, but gets most of his news from social media and cable TV,
and is kept happy insofar as his
staff feed him only positive media stories. If so, then I guess there is a possibility
his team will somehow keep Hansard away from him, and the visit will go ahead.
But it's hard to see how it could possibly succeed if he becomes aware of the
disdain in which he is held by Conservative MPs as well as the Opposition. They
have made it abundantly clear that the offer of a state visit is not intended to
honour him. Rather they regard him as a petulant but dangerous despot, who might
be bribed to behave well by the offer of some pomp and ceremony.

The petition to withdraw the
invitation has been voted down, but it has nevertheless succeeded by forcing
the Conservatives to make public just how much they despise the US President.

Saturday, 18 February 2017

After watching this interview between
BBC Newsnight's Evan Davies and Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to Donald
Trump, I realised I'd been handling conference questions all wrong. Gorka,
who is a former editor of Breitbart News, gives a virtuoso performance that
illustrates every trick in the book for coming out on top in an interview:
smear the questioner, distract from the question, deny the premises, and
question the motives behind a difficult question. Do everything, in fact,
except give a straight answer. Here's what a conference Q and A session might
look like if we all mastered these useful techniques.

ED: Dr Gorka, you claim that
you can improve children's reading development using a set of motor exercises.
But the data you showed on slide 3 don't seem to show that.

SG: That question is typical
of the kind of bias from people working at British Universities. You
seem hell-bent on discrediting any view that doesn't agree with your own
preconceived position.

ED: Er, no. I just wondered
about slide 3. Is the difference between those two numbers statistically significant?

SG: Why are people like you
so obsessed with trivial details? Here we are showing marvellous improvements
in children's reading, and all you can do is to pick away at a minor point.

ED: Well, you could answer
the question? Are those numbers significantly different?

SG: It's not as if you and
your colleagues have any expertise in statistics. The last talk by your
colleague Dr Smith was full of mistakes. She actually did a parametric test in
a situation that called for a nonparametric test.

ED: But can we get back to
the question of whether your intervention had a significant effect.

SG: Of course it did. It's
an enormous effect. And that's only part of the data. I've got lots of other numbers that I haven't shown here. And if we got to slide 3, just look
at those bars: the red one is much higher than the blue one.

ED: But where are the error
bars?

SG: That's just typical of
you. Always on the attack. Look at the language you are using. I show you all
the results in a nice bar chart, and all you can do is talk about error. Don't
you ever think of anything else?

ED: Well, I can see we aren't going to get anywhere with that question, so let me try another one. Your co-author, Dr
Trump, said that the children in your study all had dyslexia, whereas in your
talk you said they covered the whole range of reading ability. That's rather
confusing. Can you tell us which version is correct?

SG: There you go again.
Always trying to pick holes in everything we do. Seems you're just jealous
because your own reading programs don't have anything like this effect.

ED: But don't you think it
discredits your study if you can't give a straight answer to a simple question?

SG: So this is what we get,
ladies and gentleman. All the time. Fake challenges and attempts to discredit
us.

ED: Well, it's a
straightforward question. Were they dyslexic or not?

SG: Some of them were, and
some of them weren't.

ED: How many? Dr Trump said
all of them were dyslexic.

SG: You'll have to ask him. I've
got parents falling over themselves to get their children enrolled, and I really
don't have time for this kind of biased questioning.

Friday, 17 February 2017

I regard politicians as a much-maligned group. The job is
not, after all, particularly well paid, when you consider the hours that they
usually put in, the level of scrutiny they are subjected to, and the
high-stakes issues they must grapple with. I therefore start with the
assumption that most of them go into politics because they feel strongly about
social or economic issues and want to make a difference. Although being a
politician gives you some status, it also inevitably means you will be
subjected to abuse or worse. The murder of Jo Cox led to a brief lull in the
hostilities, but it's resumed with a vengeance as
politicians continue to grapple with issues that divide the nation and that people
feel strongly about. It seems inevitable, then, that anyone who stays the
course must have the hide of a rhinoceros, and so by a process of
self-selection, politicians are a relatively tough-minded lot.

I fear, though, that in
recent years, as the divisions between parties have become more extreme, so
have the characteristics of politicians. One can admire someone who sticks to
their principles in the face of hostile criticism; but what we now have are
politicians who are stubborn to the point of pig-headedness, and simply won't
listen to evidence or rational argument. So loath are they to appear wavering,
that they dismiss the views of experts.

At a time when the NHS is facing staff shortages, and as Brexit
threatens to reduce the number of hospital staff from the EU, he has introduced measures
that have led to demoralisation of junior doctors. This week he unveiled a new
rota system that has a mix of day and night shifts that had doctors, including
experts in sleep, up in arms. It was suggested that this kind of rota would not
be allowed in the aviation industry, and is likely to put the health of doctors
as well as patients at risk.

A third example comes from academia, where Jo Johnson, Minister of State for
Universities, Science, Research and Innovation,steadfastly
refuses to listen to any criticisms of his Higher Education and Research Bill,
either from academics or from the House of Lords. Just as with Hunt and the
NHS, he starts from
fallacious premises – the idea that teaching is often poor, and that
students and employers are dissatisfied – and then proceeds to introduce
measures that are designed to fix the apparent problem, but which are more
likely to damage a Higher Education system which, as he notes, is currently the
envy of the world. The use of the National Student Survey as a metric for
teaching excellence has come under particularly sharp attack – not just because
of poor validity, but also because the distribution of scores make it unsuited
for creating any kind of league table: a point that has been stressed by the
Royal Statistical Society, the Office for National Statistics, and most recently by Lord Lipsey,
joint chair of the All Party Statistics Group.

Johnson's unwillingness to engage with the criticism was discussed recently at the Annual General Meeting of the Council
for Defence of British Universities (where Martin
Wolf gave a dazzling critique of the Higher Education and Research Bill from
an expert economics perspective). Lord
Melvyn Bragg said that in years of attending the House of Lords he had never
come across such resistance to advice. I asked whether anyone could explain why
Johnson was so obdurate. After all, he is presumably a highly intelligent man,
educated at one of our top Universities. It's clear that he is ideologically
committed to a market in higher education, but presumably he doesn't want to
see the UK's international reputation downgraded, so why doesn't he listen to
the kind of criticism put forward in the official
response to his plans by Cambridge University? I don't know the answer, but
there are two possible reasons that seem plausible to me.

First, those who are in politics seldom seem to understand
the daily life of people affected by the Bills they introduce. One senior
academic told me that Oxford and Cambridge in particular do themselves a
disservice when they invite senior politicians to an annual luxurious college feast,
in the hope of gaining some influence. The guest may enjoy the exquisite food
and wine, but they go away convinced that all academics are living
the high life, and give only the occasional lecture between bouts of
indulgence. Any complaints, thus, are seen as those coming from idle dilettantes
who are out of touch with the real world and alarmed at the idea they may be required
to do serious work. Needless to say, this may have been accurate in the days of
Brideshead Revisited, but it could not be further from the truth today – in
Higher Education Institutions of every stripe, academics
work longer hours than the average worker (though fewer, it must be said,
than the hard-pressed doctors).

Second, governments always want to push things through
because if they don't, they miss a window of opportunity during their period in
power. So there can be a sense of, let's get this up and running and worry
about the detail later. That was pretty much the case made by David Willetts when
the Bill was debated in the House of Lords:

These are not perfect
measures. We are on a journey, and I look forward to these metrics being
revised and replaced by superior metrics in the future. They are not as bad as
we have heard in some of the caricatures of them, and in my experience, if we
wait until we have a perfect indicator and then start using it, we will have a
very long wait. If we use the indicators that we have, however imperfect,
people then work hard to improve them. That is the spirit with which we should
approach the TEF today.

However, that is little comfort to those who might see their
University go out of business while the problems are fixed. As Baroness Royall
said in response:

My Lords, the noble
Lord, Lord Willetts, said that we are embarking on a journey, which indeed we
are, but I feel that the car in which we will travel does not yet have all the
component parts. I therefore wonder if, when we have concluded all our debates,
rather than going full speed ahead into a TEF for everybody who wants to
participate, we should have some pilots. In that way the metrics could be
amended quite properly before everybody else embarks on the journey with us.

Much has been said about the 'post-truth' age in
which we now live, where fake news flourishes and anyone's opinion is as good
as anyone else's. If ever there was a need for strong universities as a source
of reliable, expert evidence, it is now. Unless academics start to speak out to
defend what we have, it is at risk of disappearing.